Posts tagged “overtones”

A workshop on improvising with voice colours and resonance

The voice is a special system in our body – it is eager to learn and it reacts to its own sounds. By opening your ears alone, your voice can learn to become more free and resonant.

This workshop will improve your voice by focussing for one weekend on the aspects of sound that are often overlooked: resonance, texture, timbre, overtones. Whatever level of experience you are at, this work will increase your singing skill: Beginners will be surprised about the round and resonant sound that their voice will gain, and the ease of singing that comes with it. Experienced and professional singers will improve their ability to do precision-work in this area: Using timbre and textures to compose music, solo and ‘en groupe’. How to create both soothing carpets of sound and grinding dissonant cluster-chords. How to develop the music together, how to dissolve your voice in a sea of sounds, but also make clearly defined choices and go your own way, if you are inclined to.

In the cold month of February a workshop that will warm you up from the inside and get your whole body to resonate!

Eager to participate? Let us know by sending us a message via the form below.

Resonant Voices workshop

The edge of language

Zooming in on the aspect of deconstructing & reconstructing words in the Genetic Choir pressure-cooker: Sound, syllables, from words to sound and from sound to words. Poetry created from a choir that knows the power of vowels and consonants. 🙂

A workshop about sound and silence – working in a group of singers with the complexities of open vowel sounds.

The voice is a subtle organ that is interested in it’s own sound.We usually believe that we control our singing and to a certain degree of course we do. But especially when it comes to sound quality, resonances and ‘finding the place’ in a tapestry of sound-textures, our voice is much more subtle and intelligent than us.

This might sound odd – “the voice knows what to do?” – , but it simply means that in the direct feedback cycle of hearing and producing sound, our voice can much more intricately steer it’s own sound without us intervening. This has amazing implications, for the individual voice as well as for ensemble sound. The bottom line is that sound understands itself better than we do, and in the complexity of resonances, timbre, upper- and undertones that comprise the human voice, our will is ill-equipped and much too slow to steer that process with adequate precision and subtlety.

In this workshop, we will look at the individual and collective process of singing open sounds. We will deal with principles of improvisation and self-organization (structure and freedom – intention, contact and surrender), but in this special case the music we allow will not include melodies, percussive sound-landscapes or rhythms. This limitation to open vowel sounds will open up an endlessly complex space to work in. Your enjoyment of the process of listening will expand, while making the sound more important than yourself in a playful way will allow a more finely tuned awareness to sink into your system.

We will engulf ourselves in sound colour, sound texture, resonance, brilliance of sound, natural vibrato, vowel changes and what all this does to the collective sound composition: The polyphonies and clusterchords that will arise from an ensemble finely tuned into sound work.

No specific singing background is needed to join the workshop. All levels of experience are welcome.